The one good thing that has come out of the recent so-called BCH hash war is that the original Bitcoin is back—now in the form of Bitcoin SV (Satoshi Vision).

Bitcoin SV is the only cryptocurrency with a blockchain that massively scales; it’s the only one that has utility value and the one that can do it all. At the CoinGeek Week Conference, taking place at The Mermaid at Puddle Dock in London, CoinGeek founder Calvin Ayre explains how BSV is set to take over and replace other non-scaling platforms, and then also grow utility value.

“I believe firmly that the business models of all the alternative coins, the ICOs and the digital gold and whatnot are actually not real business models and that they actually, it’s a bit of an illusion or a mirage that is being sold to people, and people who don’t understand how this stuff works are being sold a bill of goods. I think one positive outcome of the hash war is the fact that people were forced to focus on the technical choices in front of them, and I think a lot of people got educated on what the differences are,” he said. “The only one that’s got a sustainable business model, that can have growth and take enterprise investment is Bitcoin SV, which is the original Bitcoin. It’s the original economic model.”

The CoinGeek Week Conference is the perfect place to hear from thought leaders about the implications of the world’s first Bitcoin Hash War fought according to Nakamoto Consensus. The three-day conference, with a special invitation-only Miners Day kicking off the week’s events, is important for anyone already involved in crypto, as well as those looking to get started. As the only cryptocurrency that is being developed to truly serve as a digital currency, Bitcoin—now in Bitcoin SV—has the most potential to make a difference in the retail industry.

Ayre said, “This is about learning, but it’s also about planning. We’re getting a lot of thought leaders together here to plan how to move ahead to actually finally show what the power of the economic model is in Bitcoin. Because now the people that were kneecapping the business model aren’t here anymore so from that perspective, there’s a lot of euphoria about the opportunities and a lot of planning going around it, but it’s also a celebration of sorts. I mean, it’s the 10-year anniversary now of the birth of the original Bitcoin and it’s also ironically the rebirth birthday, so instead of having two birthdays like what we thought we had with BCH and BTC, we’re back to having one. And that one birthday is the birth of Bitcoin because Bitcoin SV is Bitcoin.”

There’s still time to secure your seat to the last day of CoinGeek Week, where a major announcement is about to be made. Don’t be stuck on the sidelines watching as history is made at CoinGeek Week Day 3, buy your tickets to the conference via Eventbrite today.

Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (segwit) Chain are Referred to as BTC coins. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is today the only Bitcoin implementation that follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper for Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. Bitcoin BCH is the only major public blockchain that maintains the original vision for Bitcoin as fast, frictionless, electronic cash.

When thinking about any specific initial public offering, it’s helpful to take a step back and ask the most basic of questions. Why do companies go public at all? Why are there capital markets in the first place? What’s the point of selling shares in a company? The answer is, of course, in order to raise money that will ultimately be reinvested in growth at the price of sharing profits with stockholders.

The long-anticipated Bitmain IPO is imminent, and investors may want to take a step back and ask themselves the same basic question. Why is Bitmain going public in the first place? We can always just give the standard answer that no doubt has some truth to it. Bitmain wants to raise money to grow the company, and that’s perfectly legitimate. But in the case of Bitmain, there are extenuating circumstances that make an IPO almost imperative, and that could be dangerous for initial investors.

Consider Bitmain’s balance sheet. You can find it on page 216 of their Application Proof to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. As of June 30, 2018, the company held USD $887M worth of cryptocurrencies. Most of that is held in Bitcoin Cash (BCH). On June 30th, the USD price of BCH was around $728, which means that Bitmain holds about 7% of the BCH market cap, more than the currency’s average 24-hour trading volume. Bitmain only held (as of June 20) $343M in cash or cash equivalents.

In mainstream industries, market leaders constantly lobby for more and more government regulation and protection that basically builds a protective wall to keep out competitors. It is highly unlikely that Bitmain, or any other contender for market leader in this industry, will be able to do this. While governments may tolerate the cryptocurrency industry to a greater or lesser extent, a symbiotic (or parasitic, depending on what side you’re on) relationship between government and cryptocurrencies is a nonstarter.

Further, the industry’s customer base is concentrated, easily identifiable, and interconnected. It doesn’t take much effort to advertise to the movers effectively and efficiently. This all is of course a wonderful thing, but at the same time it serves to keep any one firm from being too dominant.

Up until now, Bitmain has been dominant, but its dominance has only been through the infant bubble phase of the cryptocurrency industry. As BCH as the true Bitcoin and altcoins gain more acceptance, other firms will enter the fray – indeed many already are – and profit margins for everyone will start to fall until the market eventually finds equilibrium. For Bitmain, profit margins have already fallen substantially, from 41% in 2016 to 26% this year. They will continue to fall as competition from other mining rig manufacturers ramps up – such as from challenges Canaan, eBang, Whatsminer, and more.

Bitmain’s IPO valuation will be based on growth projections that will be based on the financial disclosures it has already made, disclosures based on the past, on the beginning of an entire industry in the rare phase when it was on fire. Its initial wild success as one of the first movers in mining are unlikely to be sustained long term. The blitz is over, both in terms of the initial lack of competition, and in terms of the price of cryptocurrencies themselves in the medium term. If Bitmain’s initial market cap is based on growth projections using its early growth figures as a starting point, its share price will likely start to deteriorate as mainstream investors begin to realize that those growth figures are unlikely to be sustained.

Hash War Dangers

Making financial matters even more risky for Bitmain and its IPO, Bitmain is preparing to fight a very expensive hash war over the BCH protocol, which will upgrade on November 15. This hash war could lead Bitmain to perilously deplete even more cash or cryptocurrency reserves.

In the upcoming BCH hash war, Bitmain is backing Bitcoin ABC, the historically lead full node implementation for BCH which it has been supporting since the BCH was birthed However, due to disagreements with Bitcoin ABC’s technical roadmap which seeks to change the original Bitcoin protocol, CoinGeek (the largest BCH miner) is backing a new competing BCH implementation called Bitcoin SV. Bitcoin SV, which stands for Satoshi Vision, is designed to fulfill the vision set out by Satoshi Nakaomoto’s original Bitcoin white paper and protocol. Unlike other competing BCH implementations such as ABC, Bitcoin SV’s roadmap is to restore the original Satoshi protocol, keep it stable, enable it to massively scale, and allow major businesses to confidently build on top of BCH.

It has been reported that Bitmain is preparing to activate 90,000 to even 150,000 new mining rigs in Xinjiang, and itself operate them to support Bitcoin ABC in the hash war. If that is true, one must wonder whether customers who have ordered mining rigs from Bitmain but have not yet received new rigs will be happy to know units are being re-directed for Bitmain’s own purposes.

The hash war comes at a fragile time for Bitmain and its IPO, and should make Bitmain’s investors and shareholders ask this simple question: is Bitmain’s ideological view of changing BCH so important as to risk depleting huge amounts of Bitmain’s remaining cash and cryptocurrency reserves for a long period of time?

Conclusion

The concept of an IPO for a cryptocurrency mainstay is itself something of a conflict of interest. A company in the business of mining decentralized, private currency that competes with government central-bank-controlled fiat, itself utilizing centralized government-regulated markets in order to raise fiat cash, can leave a sour taste in your mouth. The deeper you believe in BCH as the future of money, the harder it is to square the circle here.

Bitmain needs this IPO for itself, but it is doubtful that the broader crypto-community needs it as a whole. In a year or two, that dichotomy may become glaringly evident.

Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (segwit) Chain are Referred to as BTC coins. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is today the only Bitcoin implementation that follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper for Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. Bitcoin BCH is the only major public blockchain that maintains the original vision for Bitcoin as fast, frictionless, electronic cash.

Ideally, it should be quick, clear, and decisive. There’s talk of a long protracted hash-war, and I wanted to illustrate the circumstances in which such a thing can happen and what it would mean for the eco-system.

Dragging this out is in nobody’s interest. But the reality is that there indeed is a chance of this occurring. It may not be likely, but the possibility is there.

There are two ways I see this playing out.

The first scenario is straight forward. Both camps put all their resources up-front and forward, and we wait out to see the winning competing chain. The real trouble with this measure is that there is no definitive block count that settles a winner. But this scenario does make the assumption that whoever takes the lead early, will continue with this mining power and therefore maintain the lead.

The outcome would then look similar to the graph below:

The x axis is intentionally omitted here since the time-line on determinations is rather subjective. But suffice to say that the longer the period, the clearer the winning team of the longest chain becomes.

The possibility of the second scenario, complicates the first however. There have been rumours for example, stating that Bitmain may employ intermittent hash bursts, borrowed or rented from elsewhere (ie. A BTC pool) to ensure their chain stays ahead. I’m not here to comment on the validity of these rumours. They are at this stage, rumours, and until the hashwar is underway, we probably won’t know with certainty. But they do present a dilemma in calculating the victor.

The outcome would look something more like this:

Camp 1 in the above diagram employs an early mining effort with borrowed hash to get ahead and attempt to declare an early victory. The borrowed hash effort ends, and if Camp 2 truly has more dedicated hash, then it would begin to claw its way back to a longer chain. As Camp 2 threatens, it would re-employ the same strategy to remain in front.

This can oscillate indefinitely, and it would be a scenario that nobody would want. For many the oscillating lead would be insufficient in declaring a clear winner, and further, it has the potential to not only affect the wait time on exchanges halting withdrawals, but also, create more uncertainty for merchants, and as well as even more inconsistent block confirmations.

Coingeek is hoping that dedicated hash is used alone to settle the score. To find a victor early on and then move forward with building BCH to be a global currency. It is in part one of the reasons why Calvin Ayre referred to this possibility as market manipulation.

My personal position on this hash battle is that the longest chain should settle things once and for all. We have so much to gain, and ironically, so much to lose. I asked Calvin on his position should ABC win the hash battle, and he responded “If ABC win, then I will follow and constantly work on striving to make future changes for the better.”

I felt this was a very level headed response. If we keep saying BCH is Bitcoin, then hash power decides. The argument that hash power decides BTC is technically Bitcoin is mute simply for the fact that BTC is not even cash. It is a Frankenstein project now designed to be something else entirely different. Roger had the perfect tweet in response to this:

Being the chain originating from the genesis block with the highest accumulated proof of work is only one of the metrics that makes Bitcoin Bitcoin.Edit and decide for yourself which has more Bitcoin-ness: https://t.co/lldt4n2W4Cpic.twitter.com/FnZGye39cF

We have heard from multiple sources close to Bitcoin mining manufacturer Bitmain that the company is no longer receiving chips from its chief supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

Bitmain’s account with TSMC is reportedly in arrears to the tune of over $300 million. Bitmain owed TSMC $1 billion but could only manage to pay $700 million and is unable to pay the remaining debts.

This news comes just two months after market research firm Sanford C. Bernstein & Co published a report suggesting the Chinese ASIC manufacturer’s prospects were so dire that TSMC should abandon favourable credit terms with Bitmain.

We have yet to receive a response from TSMC regarding Bitmain’s debts, but our sources tell us that it’s unlikely TSMC will continue to do business with Bitmain even if they are able to make their debt payments.

“If TSMC continues to do business with Bitmain, they’ll require a good behaviour bond. Their chips will slow to market as they won’t start work until they’ve received payments for future orders in full.”

Allegedly, Bitmain is contemplating reaching out to Korea’s Samsung to make a chip deal, but such a deal would likely be dead in the water as Samsung has no interest in working with any company that has burned their past suppliers.

According to our source, Bitmain’s CEO Jihan Wu is running out of time to pay off the company’s debts. With close to a quarter of a billion dollars owed to other accounts, he has less than six months to make his creditors whole.

Hash war rages on
In his effort to win the current hash war happening on the BCH chain, Wu is apparently renting hash power from BTC miners (such as those in pools controlled by Bitmain – Antpool and BTC.com) and moving that hash temporarily to the BCH chain.

As a result, when one of these mercenary miners mines a block, Bitmain must pay them in BTC coins (which are guaranteed to be liquid), rather than in BCH coins. The amount paid in BTC would be the approximate monetary amount a miner would have earned (12.5 coins in block reward and transaction fees) if their hash was still mining on the BTC chain, plus some incentive amount for temporarily renting their hash.

While Bitmain could receive back the BCH block rewards mined by that rented hash, the BCH payouts will be worth significantly less in monetary value than what Bitmain will be paying out in BTC. With BCH currently in the US$550 range and BTC a little over $6200, this hash-renting is very expensive, could easily cost Bitmain millions of dollars per day, and will only exacerbate Bitmain’s massive debt load.

We’re watching the beginning of the end for the once mighty Bitmain. The group that was the dominant force in the crypto industry is now burdened with corporate and personal debt, losing suppliers and clinging to the hopes their wormhole boondoggle pays off.

The app, available on both the iOS App Store and Google Play for Android, is also designed for customers paying with their digital wallets. It also facilitates transfers between a user’s wallets, and provides an easy-to-view transaction history.

Among security features are Touch ID and Face ID options, in addition to password-protected accounts.

The app also provides synchronized access between desktop and mobile versions; QR code payments; live conversion of various currencies and displaying of one’s current balance in U.S. dollars; a built-in address book; and push notifications.

In an email to CoinGeek, the GoByte team confirmed that Bitcoin BCH is one of the first crypto coins that will be integrated in the payment system.

GoByte CEO Hisyam Nasir said, “GoByte’s mission is to be the leader in making cryptocurrency payments easier for users and merchants around the world, through the GoByte Pay platform.”

Nasir said development was still ongoing, noting, “We are developing a simple, powerful and adaptable platform which includes features that small and large businesses require to accept and process cryptocurrency payments.”

Brad Nickel, Adviser for GoByte, said in a blog post that the company will be implementing additional components, such as multi-currency compatibility, easy to implement shopping cart functions, and improving overall functionality of its apps already out on the market.

Developers of the app are working to improve integration with point-of-sale (POS) terminals, which would support random switching between addresses, audio-visual indication of payments made, and offline functionality.

GoByte has signed an agreement with retail management solutions firm iVend to have GoByte Pay installed in iVend’s POS systems located around the world.

The company also said it plans to issue cryptocurrency debit cards, ATMs, and POS terminals.

Apart from its mobile and desktop payment app, GoByte has a cryptocurrency GBX, said to be “an enhanced version” of Dash, as well as an online wallet.

Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (segwit) Chain are Referred to as BTC coins. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is today the only Bitcoin implementation that follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper for Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. Bitcoin BCH is the only major public blockchain that maintains the original vision for Bitcoin as fast, frictionless, electronic cash.

The Bitcoin BCH blockchain continues to show itself to be a versatile and strong platform. Not only is it behind the highly popular cryptocurrency by the same name, but the network itself has seen an extensive amount of developments lately that show how useful it is in real-world scenarios. Most recently, Donald Mulders, a dedicated Bitcoin BCH enthusiast, posted on Yours.org about his attempts to create a website on the blockchain, and requested some assistance. He found what he needed, and more, and the on-chain hosted Bitcoin Cash Hoarder is now live.

Explains Mulders, “I started playing around with an idea to see how far I could take it — The idea is to host a simple HTML website on the bitcoin cash blockchain that easily could be viewed in a browser so that even my own mother is able to view it as if it was just an ordinary website.”

He further offers, “Imagine if someone could publish sensitive information without the need for organisations such as [WikiLeaks], readable as a website for anyone in the world — This way anyone could publish information anonymously without endangering themselves or any middleman.”

After creating the idea, Mulders proceeded to create the site. It is a simple variation of the Snake game in JavaScript and was uploaded using cryptograffiti. The next step was to extract the data from the blockchain in order for it to be developed on a website, for which he used the BitDB platform to query the code. At this point, Mulders hit a brick wall and asked for some help, which is where unwriter stepped in.

Mulders was able to capture the attention of unwriter, who is behind several Bitcoin BCH projects, including BitDB 2.0. Using a tool called cryptograffitiweb, they were successfully able to create a simple HTML page tied to the Bitcoin BCH blockchain.

Explained unwriter, “I actually went ahead and wrote a simple web app that successfully renders [the HTML file].” He added that there it’s possible the site content may change, as it loads from the first transaction from that particular address. Nonetheless, it is still the first website hosted on the BCH chain in this manner. “And here it is… A website served from Bitcoin — Written in 5 minutes, with 59 lines of code,” exclaimed unwriter.

To see the site live, point your browser to the Bitcoin Cash Hoarder address. The source code for the site can be found in the Github repository for Cryptograffitiweb. While this early iteration of a Bitcoin BCH-hosted website may be a little clunky, it shows what’s possible with the blockchain. Having uncensorable webpages hosted on a network is a very big deal, and a huge advance for the technology.

Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (segwit) Chain are Referred to as BTC coins. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is today the only Bitcoin implementation that follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper for Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. Bitcoin BCH is the only major public blockchain that maintains the original vision for Bitcoin as fast, frictionless, electronic cash.

September 1 marked the day a massive stress test was done on the Bitcoin BCH network, and the results are in. Over 2.1 million transactions were registered on the network with a significant number of 10MB blocks—and some up to 21MB—being mined, with most of the 10MB blocks being mined by CoinGeek, the worlds first enterprise-level Bitcoin mining operation. The stress test was administered to verify the strength of the network prior to the upcoming hard fork scheduled for this November, and will more than likely turn into a regular annual event.

The number of transactions seen on the Bitcoin BCH network equates to 63% of all cryptocurrency transactions registered last September 1. It overwhelmed that of the second-most seen currency in the period, Ethereum, and was over 20 times that of BTC. According to Coin Dance, the number of microtransactions on the BCH network spiked to 14,300 per block. The average number for BTC is around 1,000 to 1,500.

As an added benefit, there was no increase in transaction fees. In fact, according to BitInfoCharts, the transaction fees actually dropped. They dipped from the normal average of $0.022 to $0.0017.

Jameson Lopp, software engineer and founder of bitcoinsig.com, was somewhat impressed by the results. He tweeted that the test had “succeeded in breaking various transaction and mempool visualizers.” In a separate tweet he posted more of the technical details of the stress test, pointing to some limitations. He said, “BCH Stress test recap: * Bottlenecks caused services such as the transaction generators to slow & error out, preventing mempool from exceeding 22 MB. * Largest block: 21.35 MB * Avg block size was ~3.6 MB: 11% of max capacity * 16% of Bitcoin ABC nodes dropped off the network.”

Not only did Bitcoin ABC have trouble keeping up, so did ViaBTC. This isn’t too much of a surprise, as Dr. Craig Wright had already predicted that the mining operation would not be able to function properly in a large-scale scenario and said that it couldn’t handle blocks larger than 8MB. As the information seen on blockchair.com confirms, ViaBTC didn’t mine any blocks above 7.999MB. For miners, it’s high time to upgrade to suppliers offering software that can scale as Bitcoin clearly scales already if you are working with the correct suppliers.

The stress test has also been successful for Bitcoin BCH’s price. It rose from $521 a week ago to hit $648 on September 1. As of this writing, it sits at $634.61, an increase of 2.78% over the past 24 hours.

Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (segwit) Chain are Referred to as BTC coins. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is today the only Bitcoin implementation that follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper for Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. Bitcoin BCH is the only major public blockchain that maintains the original vision for Bitcoin as fast, frictionless, electronic cash.

As part of his “We Are All Satoshi” series, Bitcoin BCH pioneer and supporter Rick Falkvinge has published his latest video. Falkvinge raises several good points about the motivation behind different cryptocurrencies and how these motivations impact the direction the currency takes. It all comes down to one fundamental question: Why are we here?

In perusing the various cryptocurrency forums, patterns of discussion begin to emerge. On the one hand, the BTC community has a propensity to discuss price, almost to the point of being obsessed with how the value changes from one minute to the next or how to make the biggest return on a BTC investment. On the other hand, the topics of concern in the Bitcoin BCH forums are more focused on the community and developing the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

While it may appear, then, that the Bitcoin BCH community is apathetic toward the price of the currency. It would almost seem as though the topic of price is being suppressed. However, as Falkvinge points out, this isn’t the case. Instead, there is a “collective disinterest.” The difference is that Bitcoin BCH proponents are more concerned with ensuring the development and survivability of cryptocurrency than they are with lining their own pockets.

In the early days of cryptocurrency, it seemed that supporters were breaking off into one of two camps—activists or entrepreneurs. Activists can live off of what’s available, while entrepreneurs want to make money. An entrepreneur who only wants to make money will only turn out to be an “acceptable entrepreneur.” Great entrepreneurs excel because they want to make a difference in the world. These types of entrepreneurs have a great deal in common with the activists.

Falkvinge’s rightfully points out that the number one “guiding star”—or prime directive, as he calls it—for cryptocurrency, in keeping with the original design created by Satoshi Nakamoto, is to employ the “create liberty through profit” motive. In other words, liberty comes first, profit is secondary. This is the complete opposite of the way the BTC community, which is singularly focused on making money, thinks. To them, it’s a status symbol, not a digital currency. This isn’t how you change the world.

This is why BCH community doesn’t care about getting rich. It is concerned about making things better. Falkvinge acknowledges what virtually all cryptocurrency enthusiasts think—that if it makes money in the process, it will be great. However, this is not, nor should it be, the primary goal of cryptocurrency.

Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (segwit) Chain are Referred to as BTC coins. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is today the only Bitcoin implementation that follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper for Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. Bitcoin BCH is the only major public blockchain that maintains the original vision for Bitcoin as fast, frictionless, electronic cash.